36 comments:

The Sarah Palin Facebook does so so much good and the guilty creeps Facebooks do so much damage. What can be causing this? Is it in the DNA? I blame Bush/Cheney and EPA determined CO2 poisoning working together against these innocent victims.

Oh, those are nothing to "misstell" screwups in guild-chat on MMORPGs... mostly they're just embarrassing but there's always the example of finding out your SO is having a real-life affair because she accidentally sent a message to the wrong channel.

Might be something to the biblical admonition that what is said or done in secret will be shouted from rooftops. Clean living and self-control in private as much as in public is the only sure way to avoid "accidents".

Most of those are caused by people who are not truthful, or by not following a good rule of thumb on Facebook: Don't post anything you don't want the whole world to know. Common sense, but some people have no sense.

Oh yeah. Those can be so funny. We were getting ready to go into a raid, so people were just randomly chatting.

For those who don't play. There are several levels of chat. Open guild chat, where everyone can see. Open area chat, where everyone in the entire zone can see. Whisper, where the things you say are directed at only one person and only they can see it.

So we are waiting around and joking and suddenly in guild chat, a couple start talking dirty and reliving their real life sexual escapades. The guy is supposidly dating another member of the guild, also in real life. We all go....."Um....embarassing!! We can hear you"

Immediately OMG. and a message that XXX (The guy) has left the guild followed immediately by both of the girls.

The rest of us are saying: "Wow. That was weird, funny etc. LOL. And by the way. He was going to tank the instance.....now what do we do. Darn. Now we have to find another tank"

Something like this happened where I used to work. I sent an email alerting our office manager that my monitor badly needed to be either calibrated or replaced.

She sent an email to the fellow we hired to handle such things--and accidentally replied me on it, making several snarky comments about my "complaining." Keep in mind: I'm a graphic designer; if I can't see color accurately, I can't do my job.

This woman was also the accountant and resented anyone needing anything that required spending money. And she happened to be a bitch. Boy, did I relish alerting her to her mistake.

DBQ, Synova, John, Joe and I play one or more online games. Regardless of the game, and there are numerous, there are classic roles to be played in any group (typically 6, but sometimes 12, or 24).

Tank. The guy in heavy armor who's job it is to draw attention (known as aggro) to him. His job isn't so much to kill the enemy as to be smacked around.

Healer. The healer's focus, in this order is to, keep the healer alive, the tank alive, and if time permits the rest of the group :) Likely in light armor, said to be squishy

Puller. somebody with a stand off attack who can draw in enemies to the tank.

CC. Crowd control. Opposite of the Puller in some ways. the CC guy's job is to watch the ebb and flow of the battle and to make sure that additional enemies coming into the fight are snared, stunned, frightened off or otherwise managed.

DPS. Damage per second. sometimes these are ranged fighters or sometimes melee types, or in magic oriented games, the Nuker. they tend to be moderately armored, better at dealing damage than taking it (see Tank)

Off-Tank, the backup man. not as armored as the tank, not as damage dealing as the DPS, the utility player.

I used to play WoW, but got run off by too many 12 year old's.

I play LOTRO on occasion. The people are more laid back, and I'm a sucker for Dwarves

That's because you play Alliance /wink. If you play Horde, there are more mature players. I actually created a giant ugly male Tauren just so the kiddies would leave me alone and quit trying to cyber. He is now a lvl 80 hunter maxed out engineer and miner.

I usually play a ranged class Hunter or other DPS type. Although recently I'm really enjoying my Palladin and tanking with her and sometimes being the back up healer when I switch to my other spec.

Since my foot has been injured and I'm working from home, I seem to be able to find LOTS of time to play WOW. I haven't tried LOTRO. Just what I need, yet another online time sink. I must get the game.

Even things that are supposed to be secure - are not. I have been cleaning out the email accounts of some terminated employees at this company. I have been giving administrator access, which means I can get into any employee's account if I want. I don't, because I don't care.

But the accounts I am cleaning? People. Do not conduct your personal business on your work email. By "personal business," I mean, if you you are a realtor, do not post houses on craigslist with your work email, do not make appointments to show houses with your work email, do not look for a new job with your work email.

Do not plan your wedding with your work email. Do not fight with your boyfriend with your work email. Do not discuss whether to break your engagement, your past abusive relationships, or your current psychiatric medications on your work email.

Basically, if you would not want your boss or your mother to read it, do not put it in your work email.

I'm trying to forget all the "helpful" information The Drill SGT provided(I tend to pick up definitions, roles, functions and relationships quickly and automatically), because I'm trying to maintain complete ignorance of gaming, which my son and husband adore. If I betray any knowledge or understanding, or even too much awareness, they'll take to another level their determination to succeed in their ongoing campaign to suck me into their obsessions. Well, I have enough time sinks, damn it!

Plus, though I profess otherwise to them, I do like to win ... and I'm determined to triumph against the nefarious "Get Mommy Into Gaming" forces in my home.

You really need to play so you can monitor the amount of time being spent?

I would seriously love it if my husband would want to play the games with me. However, I understand that that will never happen. He doesn't have the patience to sit and play, plus in some cases the learning curve can be steep and convoluted and he is too practical to play fantasy games.

I'm just satisfied that he does put up with my gaming. That was something that I made sure he knew up front. "I like to computer game and I will be spending time on it." He has hobbies that he enjoys (hot rods) and I would never dream of telling him that he couldn't spend the time he wanted for his leisure activities.

1) His dad primarily does that, and I am able to snoop over son's shoulder while maintaining technical gaming ignorance.

2) My spouse played in a rock band when I met him and gigged up to 2-3x a week for years, even after we were married and after he had a kid. (And we've both been road warriors at one time or another during our relationship, not to mention starting it working completely different shifts.) No way, at this late date, am I gonna drive myself crazy by monitoring. For better or worse, we've gone with the trust thing so far, and so far (so far as I know) it's worked for us.

Oh man, you don't know how many times I've seen the intimate email to ALL in the To: field goes out from people with me hearing, "OH SHIT!!!" and "How the fuck do I get that back?"

Well buddy, you can't. Most people just chuckle it off and bust balls for a few weeks about it and it's all a joke by then, but I've seen a couple that were totally NSFW, like quintuple x-rated and people were seriously pissed. Bosses mainly only because at first they thought it was a sick joke only to realize from HR that it wasn't and they had to reprimand/fire them.

I seriously do not get the attraction of WOW or other games... definitely not my cuppatea.

But I love Facebook now that my children have introduced me to it. Both daughters invited me to join and I was honored and somewhat humbled that many of their college friends also sent me friend requests... BUT

the most fascinating was the request from the 18 year old boyfriend of my daughter's youngest sister-in-law.

Wow...... do you have any idea how "hip" that makes an old lady feel?

Frankly, the people who screw up on Facebook are the same people who screw up in real life.

"I seriously do not get the attraction of WOW or other games... definitely not my cuppatea.

But I love Facebook..."

One of the primary attractions of Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) is the multi-player and online parts of that.

All the joys of chat rooms or social networking sites (like face book) but with dragons.

All the silliness of Sims-online but with chainmail bikinis and sorcerers.

(Yes, there are non-fantasy types, too.)

Not that I actually recommend it... it's a terrible, unproductive time-sink. Almost as bad as blogging!

In any case, with all this listing of games played, though, we really ought to mention *servers*. A person can't say, "Oh, I'd like to try that and maybe this person I know will show me the ropes," if you're not on the same server. So:

I play EverQuest2 on Crushbone and Unrest.

I'm presently playing Aion on the Ariel server.

And I've got a couple of characters in Lord of the Rings Online on Brandywine.

As for classes, I usually play rangers or other melee characters, I sometimes try healers and never play mages.

This is so why I just so absolutely refuse to enter yet another world [of worlds]. It gets complex quickly thereafter, and as complex as you thought THAT was, you just wish it was that simple, and then there's more, and then you go there, and then you realize there's even more to go to, and then you realize you haven't even *begun* to go there, and then you realize you *have*, and then you realize how simple it all is, but then there are all those levels (some simple, some not--but then again it depends on what you find there, simple, complex or not; or something else entirely) and then OMG OMG OMG OMG ...

... and I just can't go there just now, if ever.

Quite apart from any imagination I might have, or anything else, I'm quite mindful of, to this day, how easy it was for me--for a significant chunk of my freshman year in college--to blow off all my classes at least 2 days out of 5, on average, in favor of playing bridge easily up to 14 hours a day, while keeping track of people playing D&D with way more dedication (and for more hours) than I ever devoted to bridge. Whoa.

I mean, as loosey-goosey as I can be about things, I absolutely DO know my limits, not to mention why I ought not add more limit-breakers, for pete's sake.

I've never played any of the WoW or other games. Sometimes I think it looks like fun, but it also looks like a massive timesunk and I think I would get bored in a week or so. I'm not much of a game player, since super mario (which I actually played for a bit on my brother's wii the other day. It's fun how you have muscle memory for where things are like extra men and stars, when you haven't played in years. I even found the warp to level 4, where I did end up dying).

Facebook seems to be an application for people to demonstrate they don't know what "boundaries" are.

I mostly like looking at everyone's vacation pictures and getting all the news. I skim through a lot of the posts, though, to get to people I have actually seen in real life in the past year :)